October grocery challenge: week 1

I had a very interesting moment on the first day of the challenge. I had hopped over to Tim Challies’ blog and read an article about The Heart of Frugality. I almost immediately wanted to forget about this challenge. The article was thought-provoking and pointed a few things out to me that I would benefit to work on. I thought it over and thought about my motives for doing the challenge. I’m not doing this challenge to show off what an awesome frugal shopper I am. In fact, I admit to being the opposite. I love finding ‘good deals’ but my problem is that I find too many of them, usually at the supermarket, and can never stick to my grocery budget! Like my dad always says: “You don’t save money at a sale, you spend it.” So the challenge this month is to sort of be an exercise for me to prove to myself that with a bit of creativity and actually using the stuff in my cupboards instead of always just buying more stuff to put in them, I can stick to a budget. And I chose a very low budget for this month so that everything in the future will seem easy to stick to! :-)

I’ve already seen a change of thinking when I go to the supermarket. I only buy what I need, not all the ‘good specials’ for the sake of it. Now, I realise that sometimes you have to spend money to save money (buying in bulk, for example), but I’ll get to learn those lessons later. :-)

I thought I’d give you a run-down of what I bought, for interest’s sake. Here’s what I spent the first week of the challenge:

baby rice — $2.69
gallon of milk — $3.69
chicken stock cubes — $1.99
beef mince — $4.31
sour cream — $1.99
fresh fruit & veggies — $16.94
cheese — $2.29

Total: $33.90

Hmmm. That means that I have $66.10 left for the next 3 weeks of October, but a number of things I bought last week we’ll keep using into this week or longer.

I’ve realised that I will have to adjust our menu plans a bit. First of all, a number of recipes I made last week (nachos, chicken and dumplings, and mac ‘n cheese) were enough for 2 meals or more, so I bumped a few dishes and we had mac ‘n cheese twice and chicken and dumplings twice and I froze a meal’s worth of nacho sauce for another time. (Keep in mind too that I was sick and didn’t feel like cooking new stuff when we had left-overs!) I also realised that I was probably a bit ambitious in the amount of meat I put on the menu. :-)

So, learning from the first week, here’s the proposed menu plan for week 2:

Monday:

Mexican soup with cornbread muffins

Tuesday:

Asian Glazed Tilapia with brown rice and sugar snap pea salad

Wednesday:

Spanish Rice with mixed salad

Thursday:

Quiche and green salad.

Friday (we’re having the guests we cancelled on last week because of illness):

Roast chicken, potatoes and other roast vegetables, salad.

Saturday:

Chicken-Broccoli casserole with garlic bread and salad

Sunday:

Sandwiches or left-overs for dinner.